[3] Design for an overmantel mirror frame for the back drawing room, c1789

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / [3] Design for an overmantel mirror frame for the back drawing room, c1789

Browse

Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Town houses
  - London
    - Great George Street, number 28, London, designs for mirror frames for the drawing rooms for Sir James Eyre, c1789, unexecuted (3)
      - Design for an overmantel mirror frame for the back drawing room, c1789 (1)

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM Adam volume 3/4

Purpose

[3] Design for an overmantel mirror frame for the back drawing room, c1789

Aspect

Elevation of an overmantel mirror frame with a central four-branch candelabrum, formed with a socle base, and a fan ornamented with a part-patera and a band of enclosed calyx and anthemia. The stiles are ornamented with a band of rosettes enclosed within figure-of-eight wreaths, and this is flanked by fluted, Ionic columns and bands of beading. Above this, the capitals are ornamented with festoons, paterae and half-paterae, surmounted by a band of scrolled hearts enclosing anthemia, and by half-putti bearing baskets of flora. There is a frieze of part-enclosed calyx and arabesques, with a band of fluting above. The mirror frame is surmounted by a segmental mirrored compartment, formed with a band of scrolled hearts enclosing anthemia, ornamented with an ox skull bearing festoons of beading, and surmounted by a half-putto bearing an urn

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

Design of a Glass frame over the Chimney Piece in the back Drawing room at The Lord Chief Barons in Great George Street- and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

c1789
c1789

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and coloured washes including cerulean blue, Indian yellow, pink and terre verte on laid paper (305 x 485)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand

Watermark

Fleur-de-lis within a crowned cartouche

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index, p. 55
Harris, 1963, p. 55
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).